Abstract
Equity and inclusion are critical issues that need to be addressed in outdoor adventure education. Although some literature identifies inclusive practices for enhancing equity in outdoor adventure education, most research does not situate these practices within the contexts in which they were created and used. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore outdoor adventure education instructors’ inclusive praxis, and the conditions that influenced their praxis on their courses and in their instructing experiences. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with ten instructors from four Outward Bound schools in the USA. The instructors varied in their gender, school, types of programs facilitated, and duration of employment with Outward Bound. Our inductive analysis of the interview data focused on the identification of themes illustrating the characteristics of instructors’ inclusive praxis, as well as the conditions that influenced their praxis. Themes emerged from our analysis that highlighted the macro and micro conditions that set the stage for instructors’ inclusive praxis, which focused on creating spaces that fostered inclusive group cultures on their courses. The findings from this study may be a useful starting point for enhancing the instructors’ role in fostering equity and inclusion on outdoor adventure education courses. We conclude with suggestions for future research.
Highlights
Scholars and practitioners in the field of outdoor adventure education (OAE) have long called for the advancement of social justice within the field [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]
While we are mindful that there are many conceptual approaches to social justice, our study focuses on an approach to social justice that seems especially pertinent to efforts to promote social justice in the field of OAE: communitarian approaches to social justice
The Outward Bound (OB) instructors’ inclusive praxis was influenced by the conditions that set the stage for the creation of spaces aimed at fostering the development of inclusive group cultures
Summary
Scholars and practitioners in the field of outdoor adventure education (OAE) have long called for the advancement of social justice within the field [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13] These calls have been motivated in part by a recognition of ongoing social, economic and demographic changes to which the field must adapt in order to effectively address the needs of an increasingly diverse society [3,13]. There has been little consensus on how best to accomplish this goal [13], one common element among these calls is that they are all typically grounded in John Rawls’ [14] theory of justice—a distributive approach to
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